A social networking service is a platform to build social networks or social relations among people who, share interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his social links, and a variety of additional services. Social networking is web-based services that allow individuals to create a public profile, to create a list of users with whom to share connection, and view and cross the connections within the system. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Social network sites are varied and they incorporate new information and communication tools such as, mobile connectivity, photo/video/sharing and blogging (Wikipedia).
In recent years the amount of people in the world who use online social network channels to communicate has increased exponentially. Online Social networks are the virtual representation of social structures comprised by people who build relationships. Traditional online social network websites reflect the accumulation of acquaintances a person gathers in the course of his life. They have an open membership approach which allows any people to join the community gathered by the social network regardless their interests, believes, or points of view.
On the other hand, in recent years, there has been a peak on the emergence of online social network websites which are topic-oriented. Allowing people sharing same interests to meet and exchange information.
With all this in mind, the amount of social data generated, meaning the content shared on social networks, the diversity of the sources and tools, as well as the need to have a “smarter management” of the information being published, pose big challenges for the IT community, in order to find new methods to filter and deliver relevant information in a more controlled and automatic way.
In particular, access control, or access management, to social network is a major challenge in order to achieve a smart management of the people participating and exchanging information within a social network, particularly when trying to build value-added communities of people.
Location is one of the most important components of user context, extensive knowledge about an individual's interests, behaviors, and relationships with others can be learned from her locations (Q. Li, Y. Zheng, X. Xie and W.-Y. Ma, Mining user similarity based on location history, in ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2008, ACM). Thus, using geo-location techniques, such as GPS, or others geo-location services, some social networks add today a location component to create value. One of the most popular social networks that use geo-location is Foursquare™, where the users can “check in” digitally in physical places and communicate with other users sharing the same location.
However, users of a social network using geo-location to improve communities' creation or management may still face some disappointments. Indeed, existing techniques are unable to distinguish between a user of a social network “checking in” a said location, like a stadium for example, but in reality assisting to two totally uncorrelated events. People going to a same stadium, but one to assist to a football match, the other to assist to a concert, may not share same interests. Thus, location management of a social network access fails to create coherent communities of user within a social network.
Indeed, there is still a need today to improve the access management of social networks in order to create more value-added communities of interest among users of these social networks.